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New Richmond, Wisc., isn’t widely known as a hotbed of workplace innovation. But it’s home to the first – and so far the only – firm to follow Best Buy’s lead and adopt a results-only work environment, the financial services firm J.A. Counter.

After two months of training, the 15-worker firm went ROWE in March, tossing out the attendance sheets and letting workers come and go as they pleased.

The result? Something resembling corporate nirvana, judging by the reports of several workers.

“Incredible,” says sales assistant Shannon Mehls.

“I love it so much,” compliance manager Diana Johnston says. “You’d have to be crazy not to want to work like this.”

The shift was the idea of office manager Deb Henke, who saw mention of ROWE in an article and went to the Web site of Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson’s firm, CultureRx. Counter was trying to boost productivity, and Henke was intrigued by the promise of a more efficient work force.

So she went to a daylong ROWE seminar, and at lunch break, she called Counter’s president and told him, we’ve got to try this.

“What I saw was a way to get rid of the stuff that’s not productive, and focus on what’s going to make you grow,” she says. “Our people know what they’re doing – why not trust them to do it?”

So in late March, it became official – the old rules were history.

For Johnston the most immediate change was no longer being awakened by her hated alarm clock. When her sister had a baby she went to visit and kept working – no vacation time needed.

For Mehls, it’s meant being able to see her son’s school play, and work from home – where, she found, she gets more done without the distractions of the office.

“It’s a great feeling to be trusted to get your work done,” she says. “You’re not a kid raising your hand to go to the bathroom, and it changes the entire atmosphere.”

Others likewise report greater productivity, says Henke. Support and teamwork have increased, sniping has dropped and workers “have more respect for people’s time.”

Not that there haven’t been issues. Some workers have said it’s harder to shut themselves off during nonwork hours. The biggest issue, though, has been letting go of the guilt they feel for not being chained to their desks. Mehls says she’s had to adjust to the absence of the accumulated stress she used to feel at day’s end. “It’s like, everything got done,” she says, “but it was almost too easy.”